Settling the Score: The Big Time Musicians Behind Spring’s Most Anticipated Films

Hollywood filmmakers have long sought popular musicians to embellish their movie scores, hiring them to record radio-ready singles that are (often haphazardly) appended to the end of a film’s sound track. Céline Dion’s vocals on “My Heart Will Go On,” let’s remember, only played during the credits of Titanic, but helped composer James Horner land two Academy Award wins and remains perhaps the most memorable feature of that blockbusting behemoth.

Then came 2010’s The Social Network, for which director David Fincher commissioned a brooding, dissonant score from Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and 12 Rounds’ Atticus Ross, earning them an Oscar win and wide critical acclaim. They were certainly not the first rock musicians to successfully score a movie (or even the first to win Oscars—the Beatles earned one for 1970’s Let It Be and Prince did the same for 1984’s Purple Rain), but they catalyzed a shift in contemporary film scoring. This spring, four much-buzzed about films feature the sounds of mainstream musicians who have every chance of being serious contenders come next year’s awards season.

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Mike PattonPlace Beyond the PinesDirector Derek Cianfrance’s expert selection of Grizzly Bear tunes on the sound track of his 2010 anti-rom-com Blue Valentine set the bar high for his follow-up project, The Place Beyond the Pines. In turning to experimental rock musician Mike Patton, a veteran of various projects like Faith No More and Mr. Bungle, Cianfrance garnered even more indie cred. And when Cianfrance came calling, says Patton, “it felt like a no-brainer.”

“I didn’t see much of the film before writing and actually still haven’t seen the whole thing,” Patton says of The Place Beyond the Pines, which stars Ryan Gosling,Bradley Cooper, and Eva Mendes and is slated for nationwide release on March 29. “That was a conscious decision on Derek’s part. He said, ‘Here’s the scene. Here’s what I need. Do your thing.’” Patton took that directive as a license to compose enough for two films, turning in five minutes of music, for instance, for a 20-second cue and allowing Cianfrance to use whatever parts he liked. “I give him a lot of credit and a lot of love for giving me those parameters,” Patton says. “He could only give me that kind of license because he trusted me . . . We have synergy . . . And it worked out really well.” In terms of visual cues, Patton was barely briefed on costumes and locations, noting they were never a part of his creative process. “It’s a story of fathers and sons and grave consequences, and I felt like I had to convey that with the music,” he says. “Not to hammer it over the head. The images are already doing the real work; I had to complement them.” He continues, “Score writing is a real challenge because the music I’m used to writing is in the foreground. I’m used to writing music that demands attention.”

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M83’s Anthony GonzalezOblivion“It was really easy to say yes to Joe [Kosinski, director of the new post-apocalyptic thriller Oblivion], since we shared the same vision for the film from the beginning,” says newbie film-scorer Anthony Gonzalez. “We wanted something epic and emotional.” As the man behind M83, “epic” is a description with which Gonzalez is already quite familiar. His electronic music tends to begin on shoe-gazing soft notes and take off into wall-shaking reverb and soaring vocals; the genre is more New Wave than dance music, but dancing is almost compulsory at any one of his shows. Oblivion, out April 19 and starring Tom Cruise and Morgan Freeman, demanded an otherworldly experience from its score that called for backup, which came in the form of composer Joseph Trapanese who previously collaborated with DaftPunk on their score for 2010’s Tron: Legacy. “It’s modern-sounding, but pays tribute to bands from the seventies and eighties,” Gonzalez says. “There’s a nostalgia about it. My music is foreign and familiar at the same time.”

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SkrillexSpring BreakersHarmony Korine’s latest film, Spring Breakers, has been called many things but “comfortable” has not been one of them. Its sound track follows suit, skipping from genre to genre in an audial assault fitting for a film that so effectively uses shock value as an artistic devise. Sonny John Moore (the EDM star better known by his moniker Skrillex) provided the film’s musical backbone, whether the script required distorted dance beats or eerily solemn interludes. Skrillex also oversaw selection of other songs interspersed throughout, including tracks from Ellie Goulding, Gucci Mane, the Black Keys, Rick Ross, and Cliff Martinez, the last of whom shares Moore’s scoring credit on the film. The composer of films like Drive, Contagion, and Traffic, Martinez’s role was to tailor Moore’s aggressive music to match the film’s narrative flow. The final product is a sound track that is every bit as gonzo as the movie that inspired it.

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Underworld’s Rick SmithTrance“I’ve been working pretty solidly with Danny [Boyle] for the past two years,” says Rick Smith, whose day job is writing and performing as one-half of UK-based electronic group Underworld. “It started with Frankenstein for the National Theatre, then straight on to the opening ceremony for the Olympic Games, then three or four weeks off, and then straight into this! So it’s been pretty constant.” The “this” Smith refers to would be Trance, the prolific British director’s latest film, out April 5 and starring James McAvoy, Vincent Cassel, and Rosario Dawson. “Danny texted me and within a week I was screening the film.” (It had already been entirely shot and partly edited before Smith came on board.) “My favorite aspect of working with [Danny] is how much time he’s prepared to invest,” notes Smith. He comes to the studio and I play him ideas that I have, and he has a fantastic ability to see inside a piece, go beyond a couple of layers.” Smith has been working in film for more than a decade (Underworld songs were featured in Boyle’s 1996 classic Trainspotting). Asked how his work in film compares with writing an album, Smith says, “actually for me, a lot of it is quite similar to the work I do with Underworld. What I brought to dance music in the early nineties was a sense of story and a feeling that you could be filmic, paint pictures, as well as groove along in a happy way. So in that sense it’s not that alien to me.”